5 Must-Have Androids phone apps for June 2012

With the combination of having to had to recently do factory reset and new friends moving to the Android platform, I decided to write a quick blog entry about what I consider to be the 5 must-have apps on the Android platform for me.

I’ve used Lookout since they were called Flexilis on the Windows Mobile (no, not Windows Phone) platform. They’ve grown to be an authority on mobile security with applications on the iPhone, the Android and the Blackberry platform. They offer the ability to scan applications that scan apps as you install them. This is particularly useful for Android apps especially if you plan to install apps that aren’t in the Marketplace for whatever reason. This is often used for installing apps that are in beta stages. Other features include backing up information (i.e. photos, contacts, calls, etc) and a slew of functions that allow you to deal with a missing device such as locating your device, making your phone scream, remote locking and remote wiping your device. My favorite feature is the find your device followed by making it scream. It’s a really quick way to find my misplaced devices 🙂

It’s hard to imagine typing on a smartphone without Swype. It was the first keyboard that introduced swiping gestures as a means to enter information on a phone. Because you’re moving over more letters and numbers, it actually tends to be more accurate. Because you’re swiping, it’s actually a bit faster because you’re not lifting your finger up to type. When it first came out, it didn’t handle touch typing as well because it didn’t perform autocomplete. It now does that just as well as the swiping. The one thing though is that it’s a beta product and not in the Google Play Store. While there are other products that do something similar like Flex T9, Swype is still the best in market especially since being bought by Nuance. You’ll have to sign up for it and install it here.

Evernote is probably the first app that I used that has a desktop client, web client and mobile client. It was one of the first truly productive web services available in the market when it started. Evernote has also grown to be a leader in its space. Although I do have Springpad and Catch installed, I find myself using it the most because of the desktop and web client availability. There are so many awesome features on Evernote such as OCR and speech to text translation which are extremely useful. The Windows client also supports drawing as well. However, the feature that I absolutely can’t live without is the offline sync and its rich multi-client application.

I use Pocket largely because it was the first official Instapaper-like app on the Android. I needed it to mark articles on my Google Reader feed to follow-up again later. Also, I use it to archive any bookmarks of links that friends send me. When Read It Later became Pocket, it also became a beautiful application to read links. This is a particularly powerful app when leveraged with Android’s Sharing capabilities

Dropbox is a well-known file sharing service so I won’t bore you with what it does. But there are two things about Dropbox for Android that are awesome. The first one is it’s ability to sync your photos automatically to your Dropbox account. This is especially great when I use multiple devices and it’s nice to be able to consolidate all my photos in one place. To encourage this, Dropbox will increase your free account with 2 additional GBs of space which is the second awesome thing I love about Dropbox for Android. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, you can use my referral link where both of us can have an additional 500 MB of space. Here’s my link: http://db.tt/sIzRrr71